Finding a suitable video fragment in a vast video archive is mostly a complex task. Even professional users have to skim many hours of stored video data before they find the desired content. In this paper, we present a user-centred software engineering approach that is employed to create a novel news video explorer for TV broadcasting industry. This approach helps to ensure the balance between the tech-nological progress in the field of information retrieval on the one hand and the needs and goals of the end users on the other hand.